The best way to think about the relationship between customer service and marketing is to imagine having a contractor come to remodel your kitchen.
At first, the discussions are probably about all the changes you want to make, and the contractor talks about their firm’s expertise and experience in making it happen. They might even have photos to show you from similar projects they’ve done with other customers. They might try to offer competitive pricing or other extras.
This is the “marketing” part of the experience, and it began with the moment you first discovered them through an online ad, a social media post or a search that brought you to the firm’s web site.
Later, once the work has been done, you come back to look at what happened to your kitchen. Hopefully you’re fully satisfied, and can’t wait to use the new space to cook your next meal. In many cases, though, there are questions to be answered and some extra help needed.
Perhaps the new cabinet doors don’t close properly. You turn the faucet, but no water comes out. An electrical issue means your fridge is shorting out and your food risks getting spoiled.
Whether you notice these things right away or in the weeks or months afterwards, your satisfaction as a customer will depend entirely on how fast, friendly and thoroughly the contractor responds. This the “customer service” part of the experience.
The difference in many other kinds of businesses — from retailers to B2B vendors — is that the people who are part of the marketing conversation and the customer service conversation aren’t always the same people.
In fact, interacting with the marketing team vs. the customer service group can feel like you’re dealing with two entirely different organizations. One doesn’t appear to talk to the other, and they may not immediately remember you as a customer.
Successful organizations avoid this by recognizing marketing and customer service as distinct but interrelated points on the customer journey. In doing so they look for ways to encourage collaboration and make sure what happens in customer service becomes more than troubleshooting. Instead, it becomes an important part of building their brand. This includes:
Helping Build A More Three-Dimensional Customer Persona
When marketers are trying to communicate to their target audience, they develop personas that serve as representative examples of the kind of people who will most likely convert into buyers. Those personas can be based on a lot of sources, from market research to interviews with existing customers and input from sales reps.
If a persona is only based on the early to middle parts of the journey, however — the moment of awareness to consideration and purchase — it’s not really giving marketers the full story. The customer service team has the best insight into what happens next.
By offering data that points to trends around common frustrations or questions, marketers can do a better job of ensuring new customers’ expectations will be met. Customer service agents may also have conversations that inspire ideas about what people like about a brand, what keeps them loyal and other products they’d like.
Identifying The Most Likely Ambassadors
So much of the content marketers create aims to tell a story in which their customers are the heroes. This is true of ad campaigns and downloadable assets such as eBooks and guides. There’s a tendency, however, to lean on actors or stock art to represent those customers.
Though customer service teams put out a lot of fires on a company’s behalf, they also come into direct contact with some of a brand’s biggest success stories. There are customers who will enthuse about how much they love or need a product, even as they’re looking for help in using it. Some might mention how they talk about the brand to their friends.
These are the kinds of people a marketing team should be getting to know as intimately as possible. Though they might not see themselves this way, they are acting as ambassadors for the company, creating word-of-mouth marketing that every brand wants.
Marketers can partner with customer service teams to see which of these ambassadors might be willing to offer a testimonial, serve as the subject of a case study or be directly involved in some other kind of content the team wants to create. The results will likely be more persuasive anything else the team produces.
Bringing Omnichannel Experiences Full Circle
So you work in a marketing department that’s compiled a sizeable number of customer e-mail addresses you can use to target with promotions and offers. Great! But what happens when those same customers want to respond to your e-mail blasts with service and support issues?
The same thing can happen on social media. The marketing team may want to use platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to reach customers where they are, enticing them with compelling posts about products and services. It will probably work — but customers tend to see social as a medium for two-way exchanges that also include getting help with their purchases.
Taking an omnichannel approach to the customer experience requires more than simply establishing your brand’s presence and then pushing out information to bring in more business. You also need to be ready to respond to your customers when they want to use those same channels for questions or complaints.
Fortunately, technologies are available that are specific to customer service teams to work within those other channels, just as there are tools for marketers. The goal should be to map out what those journeys might look like and to make sure each group understands where they should focus, and where they should hand something off.
When service and marketing departments are well aligned, a brand is in the best possible position to have a consistent and cohesive dialogue with customers. It means the goals of both groups become easier to achieve, and for the brand’s sales and reputation to grow as a result.
